Electronic commerce cards are frequently used by consumers to make purchases from merchants over the Internet. Electronic commerce cards include credit cards, debit cards, prepaid purchase cards, travel cards, or any other system that can be used instead of cash to purchase goods or services. One example of an authentication system enables a cardholder to associate a password or other identifying information with an electronic commerce card. To make a purchase online, the consumer must provide the password or other identifying information associated with the electronic commerce card. This ensures that the person possessing the electronic commerce card is actually authorized to use the electronic commerce card.
Once a consumer has been authenticated as an authorized cardholder, the electronic commerce card transaction can be completed by the merchant. Previously, authentication and transaction processing used a decentralized, distributed computing model to communicate messages between merchants, card associations, and authentication servers. In this approach, there is no centralized point for collecting data and monitoring system performance. Instead, each end point in the system, such as merchants, authentication servers, and card issuers, must be asked to collect data and monitor performance of their portion of the overall system.
This decentralized model makes it difficult for the electronic commerce card association, which is responsible for the entire system, to evaluate the system performance as a whole. Additionally, this lack of visibility of the entire system prevents the card association from spotting trends or patterns that would assist in understanding where and how to add new features. Furthermore, the decentralized model makes upgrades and migration difficult, as each end point must be able to communicate with its counterparts, regardless of the features or software versions supported. The decentralized model also increases support and service overhead, and decreases the fault tolerance of the system.
Therefore, it is desirable to have an electronic commerce card authentication and transaction processing system that facilitates monitoring and management, increases overall reliability and fault tolerance, and simplifies system upgrades and migrations.